Matt Daniel-Baker is many things. A former junior league and semi-pro footballer playing for Watford FC and Saffron Walden respectively, an actor and star of the silver screen, having played a Naboo foot soldier in Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, a member of the Magic Circle and a world-renowned mind reader, it’s safe to say that Matt was born to entertain and he does it with a flair and mystery unmatched by anyone else in his field.
From his one-man residency at Crazy Coqs in the West End to cruise ships to sharing a stage with Basil Brush, Matt brings his unique talents to the stage and for the duration of the show he mesmerises and transports you into a world where nothing is quite as it seems.
I have been fortunate enough to see Matt perform four times, twice at Crazy Coqs, once in an intimate setting at a whisky club and once on the Basil Brush Live & Unleashed tour. From the minute Matt walks on stage there is an air about him, he’s insanely modest given how talented he is but it is clear that this was his calling. I had the absolute honour of interviewing Matt and getting inside the mind of the mind reader.
Where it all began
Hi Matt, thank you so much for agreeing to sit down with me today. Wait, you’re not reading my mind right now are you?
Hi, thank you very much for interviewing me. No I’m not reading your mind right now but I can if you want. It won’t take long!
Your resume is incredible, how do you go from semi-pro footballer to acting?
It was quite easy to transition because I could feel it happening, I could feel the tug of showbiz calling me and when I got released from Watford it was literally one door closing and another door opening. I think it was always going to happen, it was always on my mind that one day I would like to be an actor or some sort of performer. I think football kept me safe growing up and taught me discipline and all the little mindsets I used to use with football and trusting my instincts that all came in very handy.
You started as a footballer then became an actor, where did your love of magic come from and how did that career path start?
Magic found me while I was acting. As a struggling actor, you need to find other work. I used to work front of house in all the theatres in the West End – Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Her Majesty’s, The London Palladium, Shaftesbury Avenue. One day I was on the underground going to work and a homeless guy got on the train and just announced that he needed some money and he didn’t want to beg for it, he wanted to earn it. He pulled out a little yellow hanky, closed his fist, pushed the hanky into his fist, and it vanished. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I couldn’t believe it. He then made it reappear. The doors of the train opened, and he just got straight off, didn’t give anyone a chance to give him any money. I think he was just used to not getting any. But it completely blew my mind and I knew that that feeling was what I’d been looking for. It just made so much sense to me. It resonated with how I feel about things and the way that I think.
A few months later, I found a little magic shop and I told them what I’d seen and the guy behind the counter sold me the stuff, did a couple of card tricks, sold me a book, and I literally set off thinking, I want to learn one fantastic magic trick, just one card trick that I could have for the rest of my life. Little did I know. that it would become a hobby, become a passion, become an obsession, and take me all over the world. That homeless guy literally changed my entire life. It was an incredible sliding doors moment – one I am extremely grateful for.
The art of magic
You started out this career as a magician. How did mind reading come about?
It came about because I used to do a lot of close-up work, table work, mixing and mingling, and it was card tricks, coin tricks, little tricks with people’s rings and watches, all kinds of stuff. For me, it always felt like I was kind of performing at people. As good as it was, and as much as I enjoyed it, it became a little bit like performing on autopilot and something wasn’t quite connecting for me. So then, during a card trick, I would ask them to think of someone or think of a word or draw a picture, and I would try and figure it out, but I had the safety net of falling back on the trick if I needed it. And to keep myself engaged with the person, I would try and gently read their mind.
I found that the reactions to that were incredible, everything changed in that moment and I knew that the way that I could connect with an audience was via mind reading, via making it about them. So then combining it with my personality and my wit it all just slotted into place and I found that the more I could make them engage with me, the more fun, the more impressive and the more astounding everything that I did became.
You’re a member of the prestigious Magic Circle, which is an incredible achievement in itself. What did becoming a member mean to you, and what does being part of the Magic Circle mean to you as a performer and a mind reader?
So that came about when I first started learning magic, I thought it would be really amazing if I could get into the Magic Circle. It seemed like something that not many people could do. Imagine being able to say, ‘I’m in the Magic Circle’. I was already earning money as a magician so I didn’t really need to join in terms of work, but I always knew that I wanted to get in there. Eventually the opportunity came around and you have to audition in front of a panel of magicians and there’s an audience of magicians. I went in, did my audition and passed cleanly, unanimously. It was great.
I’ve since gone on to become an associate member of the Inner Magic Circle, which is another level within the Magic Circle, and the president, Marvin Berglass, often asks me to go and perform for special nights and different things. So yeah, it’s a lovely thing. I achieved my mission and it’s nice to be recognised within your own industry, within the magic circle with being an associate of the inner magic circle.
The pandemic changed the way performers could work almost overnight. How did COVID affect your work as a mind reader?
I was quite lucky because I had a lot of clients when the pandemic hit, and they all sort of came to me and said, “is there anything you can do?” I didn’t think that it could work. I thought I was going to be sat there doing nothing for however long it took. But thankfully, one of them convinced me to do just a 20-minute performance.
So I came up with what I felt could work. I didn’t know whether it would be any good or whether it would fool anyone or work across a screen. But it did, and they absolutely enjoyed it. I enjoyed it and by doing it, I realised that there were things I could do that I couldn’t actually do in real life, bizarrely. So I ordered a backdrop, I bought some lights, I got a camera, and I worked out an hour’s show..
It was difficult, more than anything, because everyone has to be muted. So you can’t hear anyone laugh or clap or cheer or call out. It would be carnage if you’ve got 50 people all screaming into their microphones. So I had to learn a different kind of energy, like a performing energy, and I had to base it on facial reactions to see where they were at, whether they were laughing, whether they were intrigued, whether they were shocked, whether they were thinking. It quickly worked and, and what happened was the word spread, thankfully, very quickly and I ended up being busier than I’d ever been in normal life.
I can remember doing 14 shows in one day. I started at 7am in India, and I finished at midnight with a group in Philadelphia, USA. Meanwhile, I’d been to Sweden and Germany that same day,as well as all the UK gigs. I literally didn’t leave my dining room. I can tell you also that I was suited from the waist up only! So there you go – the life of a pandemic performer!
I have heard you being referred to as a mentalist but you call yourself a mind reader. Is there a difference?
That’s a good question actually, because the international term for what I do is actually a mentalist. That’s part of the genre of magic that deals with mind reading. The term mentalist works in every single country around the world, apart from the UK. So I call myself a mind reader, although there’s no real difference. The problem that I have with it, unfortunately, is that people presume that mind reading is also like a psychic or clairvoyant gift, and that sometimes puts people off because they’ll go, ‘oh, no, I’m not going to see him. I don’t want to speak to the dead’, and it’s really not that at all. The term mind reader does, for some, seem to be affiliated with psychic readings, but it’s just mind games and mind magic.
How much of what you do is psychology, and how much is performance?
Another good question. Well, it’s all performance. It’s all performance-based. But within the performance, there’s all sorts going on. There is psychology going on, there’s influence going on. There’s magic, there’s suggestion. It’s little bits of everything that you sort of mush together. Adding humour is very important for me as well. All of those things combined become the performance. So it’s not any one thing. It really is loads of different things and I call upon and use all of those, depending on what kind of routine or effect I’m trying to achieve. But fundamentally it’s all performance.
Is there ever a point during a performance where you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next?
Yes, 90% of the time, that’s how whatever I’m doing starts off. I’ve got no idea what the person is going to think, how they’re going to react, what they’re going to choose. How they’re going to be, and that’s the thrill of it for me. That’s the exhilarating bit because I don’t know. And then within seconds, I start to learn very quickly about their personality, and then I’ve got something to go on and I can start to manipulate the way they think and the way they behave and the way they interact with me. So most of the time I have no idea, I know what I want to do, but it means nothing until I’ve figured out their personality very quickly.
You are also an extremely funny guy, and have a quick ad-lib wit, I imagine that given you work with live audiences that comes in quite handy?
Well, thank you very much. I think I’m naturally quick-witted. I didn’t ever think that it would become such an important part of my performance. I always thought that if you try to be too funny, it would detract from being a serious mind reader. You feel like you should take it very, very seriously. But I found that getting people on side by making them laugh not only gave me a lot more time to breathe and think about what I was doing. It seemed to connect me to people a lot more and it almost comes as a bonus that my shows are funny. And it doesn’t detract from the strength of the mind reading, so I think I’ve somehow managed to find a perfect balance between the two that makes mind reading entertaining, because sometimes it can be a little bit dull if you’re holding your temples and staring at someone. That’s all right for a few minutes, but to sustain a 75-minute show, you need a little bit more than that, I think. So yeah, the humour is extremely important to me.
Following on from that, have you ever had a trick or routine go spectacularly wrong on stage, and how did you recover?
I have, actually, I’ve had quite a few things go wrong. But again, the humour has always got me out of it. It’s almost as though it doesn’t matter. Whereas again, if you’ve built the tension up and everyone’s gripping the edge of their seat, you know, ‘is he going to do it?’ and you get that wrong, I mean, that’s bad news for everyone. But for me, because there’s humour, I can sort of work around most problems and go down a different path using the very thing that’s just gone wrong. So it actually becomes a different sort of trick, but the humour is very much the transition into that. While I’m panicking, they’re laughing. Stuff goes wrong all the time, but as a professional in any industry, it’s having other ways of getting to the end. I think that’s what makes the difference between professionals and amateurs. You’ve got an arsenal of stuff that you can draw upon to get you out of problems.
I’ve seen you perform in very different settings, from Crazy Coqs to a whisky club and then on the Basil Brush tour. Does the audience change the way you approach a performance?
It changes a little bit. It’s more to do with the environment that you’re in, the venue. It’s also the difference between just being a magician or a mind reader and having an act. When you have an act, which is what I’ve got, you deliver that act. So what that does is it stops you being a sort of a victim of the environment. What a lot of performers do, or a lot of magicians do, is they’ll look at the gig, they’ll look at the venue, they’ll look at the client, and they’ll adapt what they do to those things. Whereas when you have an act, you go in and you perform what you do. So the audience, in a sense, is going to get the same thing every single time in terms of your act. And I think that’s really important. It gives you a strength, it means that the venue, that the audience has to align with what you’re doing rather than you being dictated to by them. And it makes you go out and perform, it makes you stronger, and it makes you deliver a much better performance.
Speaking of Crazy Coqs, you have a residency in the West End. Can you tell us a bit more about that? How long has it been going on for and why should people come and see your show?
My show at the Crazy Coqs is a residency. I’m currently in my fifth year as we speak in 2026. It really is the flagship of my career. It’s changed everything for me. It’s given me a presence. It’s given me somewhere to allow people to come and see me. I can bring clients along, potential clients. I do a lot of charity shows where we offer tickets away in a raffle or in an auction. So it can bring in money. But for me, it just makes me very visible, very current, very relevant. And it offers a trust to clients that they know they’re getting someone that’s got a show in the West End and I’m thrilled that it sells out every show, it’s got a great reputation. It’s family friendly, I don’t ever swear during my act. It’s still funny and a little bit edgy at times, but I would say if you’re 10 years old and above, it would work for you. It really does mean everything and the venue itself and the staff, they’re all incredible and it’s such a magical place right underneath Soho and Piccadilly. There’s a whole world under there, and it’s glamorous, it’s old school cabaret, just as it should be. And I absolutely love it.
This has been part one of a two part interview with world-renowned mind reader and magician, Matt Daniel-Baker. Part two will be released later today. To find out more about Matt Daniel-Baker you can visit his website here.
You can also follow Matt on Facebook or click the below link to follow him on TikTok.
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